Tilburg University
Female perpetrators - ordinary and extra-ordinary women
Smeulers, A.L.
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International Criminal Law Review
Publication date: 2015
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Citation for published version (APA):
Smeulers, A. L. (2015). Female perpetrators - ordinary and extra-ordinary women. International Criminal Law Review, 15(2), 207.
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1
Female perpetrators:
ordinary or extra-ordinary women?
Alette Smeulers, Universities of Groningen and Tilburg Abstract
Only a very small percentage of the perpetrators convicted by international criminal courts and tribunals are women. This raises the question as to whether women are less evil than men. Within literature it is generally assumed that the genocide in Rwanda was unprecedented in relation to the role played by women and that it is the first and only period of mass violence in which many women were involved. This explorative study however shows that women have played a much larger role than we have generally assumed so far and that women can be just as evil as men – although it indeed seems true that generally far less women than men are involved in mass atrocities. There is a clear gender bias in the portrayal of female perpetrators as sadists, natural or lacking agency, but it can be questioned whether female perpetrators are less ordinary than male perpetrators.
Keywords
Perpetrators - international crimes - women - gender
1. Introduction
On 24 June 2011 Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for her leading role in the genocide and commission of widespread rape in Butare. She was the first woman ever to be convicted by an international criminal court or tribunal for genocide and sexual violence. The only other woman who has been convicted by an international criminal tribunal was the Serbian politician Biljana Plavsic – who pleaded guilty and was convicted for
persecution as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on 27 February 2003. Over 280 men have been convicted by international criminal courts and tribunals and these two women thus represent less than one per cent of all people convicted by such courts and tribunals. This raises the question why so many male perpetrators and so few female perpetrators have been convicted. Are women less capable of committing mass atrocities than men as suggested by the stereotyped and gendered image of war in which men are portrayed as perpetrators and women as victims? Or are there other reasons that can explain why most perpetrators are male? In order to answer these questions an explorative literature survey on the role of women within periods of mass violence has been conducted. It has been assessed what kind of roles women have played so far and how significant and extensive their involvement has been (section 3). Next the relevance of gender roles and gender norms will be discussed (section 4). Specific attention will be given to the way in which female perpetrators are portrayed within literature and the media. Next the military will be discussed as it is an extremely gendered institution. The cases of Plavsic and Nyiramasuhuko will be discussed in more detail in section 5 while in section 6 the focus will be on the motives of the lower ranking women involved in mass atrocities. The overall aim of the paper is to get an insight in the extent of the involvement of women in mass atrocities and to get a better understanding of their roles. We will however start in section 2 with briefly
presenting the very stereotyped and gendered image of war which has been prevalent within literature for such a long time.
2. The Gendered Portrayal of War and Mass Violence
2
resulting in many civilian casualties.1 War can thus no longer be considered a ‘conflict between men’ and ever since a lot of attention has been focused on the suffering of women during warfare. Although this might have initially been a neglected area of interest this particular focus has gradually transformed into a very stereotyped portrayal of war in which men are pictured as the aggressors and women as the victims.2 Behind this vision is the assumption that women are inherently more peaceful than men.3 Although it is absolutely true that many women are victimized and suffer as a consequence of war, so do many men. When studying war and genocide it
becomes clear that violence is often gender based as it is not only directed against certain national, ethnical, racial or religious groups but also specifically directed against either the men or the women within that particular group.4 In general there seems to be a tendency to consider all males - even the unarmed ones - as combatants and the women as civilians.5 This classification has serious consequences as it transforms men into legitimate targets and thus exposes them to violence.6 In his classic book on genocide Kuper remarked: ‘while unarmed men seem fair game, the killing of women and children arouses general revulsion.’7 In his work on gendercide Adam Jones concludes that these differing perceptions of women and men indeed result in
differences in casualties: ‘…the most vulnerable and consistently targeted population group, throughout time and around the world today, is non-combatant men of battle age, roughly around fifteen to fifty-five years old.’8 While many men are targeted because they are considered legitimate targets, women too suffer from gender based violence albeit in a different way. The most common form is sexual violence – many women in many wars over the years have suffered from various forms of sexual violence. In the war in former Yugoslavia and more particularly in Bosnia Herzegovina sexual violence even became a deliberate war tactic. Some scholars have argued that rape was deliberately used as a means to utterly humiliate male warriors for having failed to protect the ‘honor and purity’ of their women.9 It has to be noted however that not only women are the victims of gender based sexual violence. The horrific pictures of the sexual abuse and violence in the Abu Ghraib prison seem to indicate that in the War on Terror the sexual humiliation and abuse of men was an explicit war tactic. Devout Muslim men were humiliated ‘through the reversal of gender roles.’10
In this war American soldiers ‘exploited every gender and sexual taboo in the Arab world – men dominated by women, men posed in homosexual acts, men treated as dogs.’11 The effect on the male victims was devastating: ‘It’s okay if they beat me. Beatings don’t hurt us, it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman.’12 The fact that sexual violence was used against men rather than women was however not the only anomaly. May be even more remarkable was the fact the perpetrators were women who used their sexuality as a weapon. These examples show us that war and gender are two concepts which require particular attention when studying the causes of
1 Kaldor notes that the nature of warfare has changed significantly and that most contemporary wars are so-called ‘new wars’ which are internal rather than international armed conflicts. See M. Kaldor, New & old wars –
organized violence in a global era, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006).
2 C. Coulter, ‘Female fighters in the Sierra Leone war: challenging the assumptions?’, Feminist Review (2008) 55-73, at p. 55 and Maria Eriksson Baaz & Maria Stern, ‘Fearless fighters and submissive wives: negotiating identity among women soldiers in the Congo (DRC)’,39 Armed Forces & Society (2012) 711-739. See also J.A. Tickner & L. Sjoberg, ‘Feminism’, in T. Dunne, M. Kurki & S. Smith (eds.) International relations Theories –
discipline and diversity (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), p. 193 who conclude: It is a widespread myth
that men fight wars to protect vulnerable people usually defined as women and children.’ 3
Coulter, supra note 2 , p. 55.
4 The Srebrenica massacre is one of the best documented examples thereof.
5 Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Women and war ten years on’, 24 Review of International Studies (1998), 447-460, at pp. 453-454.
6
R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Women and Children first: gender, norms and humanitarian evacuation in the Balkans 1991-95’, 57 International Organization (2003) 661-694.
7 L. Kuper, Genocide – its political use in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981), p. 204.
8
A. Jones, Gender inclusive – essays on violence, men and feminist international relations, (Routledge, London and New York, 2009), p. 153.
9 N. Zabeida, Not making excuses: functions of rape as a tool in ethno-nationalist wars, in: R.M. Chandler, L. Wang & L.K. Fuller (eds.), Women, war and violence – personal perspectives and global activism (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2010), p. 23.
10 F. D’Amico, ‘The women of Abu Ghraib’, in T. McKelvey (ed.), One of the guys – women as aggressors and
torturers (Seal Press, Emeryville, 2007), p. 45.
11 Ibid, p. 81. 12
3
mass violence.13 They also show that men are not only perpetrators of mass violence within periods of war but also often the victims thereof and that women are not just victims of warfare and mass violence but can also be the perpetrators thereof. The best documented example of the involvement of women in mass violence is without doubt the genocide in Rwanda in which many women played a role. These facts were highlighted by African Rights which published a report on the involvement of women entitled ‘not so innocent’.14 It is therefore time to counter this stereotyped and gendered image of war and mass violence. In this paper I aim to do that by focusing on the role of women within war – not as victims but rather as perpetrators.15 In the next section the focus will on the different roles played by women in warfare and in relation to mass atrocities. The aim is to assess whether the involvement of women in the Rwandan genocide was indeed so exceptional as it is generally portrayed within literature or whether the involvement of women in mass atrocities is so much larger than we have assumed so far.
3. Roles Played by Women in Periods of Mass Violence
The most typical role played by women during a period of mass violence is as a silent bystander and supporter of the regime. Although such a supporting role falls short of entailing any criminal responsibility for the crimes committed the importance of such a role should not be underestimated either. Men like Hitler would never have gained so much power without the support of the masses which include both men and women. Research has furthermore shown that the role of bystanders is far more important than we tend to think. Perpetrators carefully look at the reaction of the bystander. If the bystander is inactive this is usually interpreted by the perpetrator as silent approval and support. By remaining passive bystanders - at least in the eyes of the perpetrators - seem to justify and legitimize the actions of the perpetrators and help them to maintain the social context in which they believe themselves to be entitled to commit their crimes. Women can also silently support genocide and other forms and manifestations of international crimes in the private sphere, namely as loyal wives to their husband who took up a more active role. In Nazi Germany for instance the SS-men could not marry without specific approval of the SS which tested whether the wives believed in the SS ideas as well and were worthy of marrying a member of the elite force. Some 240.000 women married SS-men thus supporting the existence of this elite force and providing legitimization for it.16 Many of these Nazi women were allowed to live close to where their husbands worked (for instance a concentration or death camp) and thus became fully aware of what was going on.17 As such they contributed to the commission of these crimes by not criticizing their husbands and providing them with emotional support.18 Nazi Germany was not the only country in which loyal women and wives played an important role by supporting the regime and their involved husbands. This is the case in many countries in which international crimes are committed. These passive roles were, however, not the only way women were involved in periods of collective violence. In the following section the focus will be on the various and more active roles played by women.
3.1 Women as Administrative and Supporting Personnel
Probably by far the largest group of women involved in mass violence are those involved as administrative and supporting personnel. During the Holocaust in Nazi Germany many governmental organizations were somehow involved in progressively excluding Jews from taking part in ordinary life, in discriminating them, rounding them up, sending them on transport, holding them prisoner in one of the many concentration camps and finally killing them. The Nazi Holocaust has been qualified as a bureaucratic mass murder. Hilberg stated: ‘It must be kept in mind that most of the participants of genocide did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas
13 Coulter, supra note 2, p. 55 argues the ‘notion and discourse about war itself is gendered.’ 14
African Rights, Rwanda not so innocent – when women become killers (African Rights, London, 1995). 15 See also Jamieson who concluded: ‘It is absolutely and consistently the case that in war women are victims of all kinds of abuse, including sexual abuse, but the events in Rwanda suggest that this is not the whole story.’ R. Jamieson, ‘Genocide and the social production of immorality’, 3 Theoretical Criminology (1999) 131-146, at p. 142.
16 See K. Kompisch, Täterinnen - Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau Verlag, 2008), p. 204; W. Lower,
Hitlers Furiën (Spectrum, Antwerpen, 2013) and W. Lower, ‘Male and female Holocaust perpetrators and the
East German approach to justice’, 1949-1963, 24 Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2013), p. 70. See also for the Rwandan context N. Hogg, ‘Women’s participation in the Rwandan genocide: mothers or monsters’, 92
International Review of the Red Cross (2010) 69-102.
17 See Lower, supra note 16.
18 See C. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland (St Martin’s Griffin, 1991). See also for the Rwandan situation Hogg
4
chambers … most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desks.’19 Amongst these bureaucrats were many women.20 During the Nazi period it is estimated that 12 million women were working in NS organizations which was one third of the female population. Their involvement in these crimes as
administrative and supportive personnel can without doubt be qualified as significant.21 Within the camps women often had administrative functions and the infamous Einsatzgruppen for instance were accompanied by female secretaries.22 Women were also involved in the so-called Euthanasia program as administrative personnel and as nurses.23 Even mid-wives played a role by assessing whether a pregnant woman would be sufficiently qualified to raise her child according to National-Socialistic standards and if not then an abortion was advised. Once children were born and turned out to be handicapped then the mid-wives had to report this so that measures within the Euthanasia program could be taken. Midwives received 2 Deutsch Mark for every report and could receive a fine of 150 Mark if they did not report on such occasions.24
The genocide in Rwanda was an entirely different type of genocide as compared to the Holocaust. It was not a bureaucratized process which took years. The killings were well prepared but took place in a three-month period and were perpetrated by so-called killer groups consisting of ten to100 people.25 These groups set up road blocks, conducted house by house searches, apprehended, often raped and maltreated and finally killed all the Tutsis and moderate Hutus they could find. Usually only the most fanatic members of the group were physically involved in the actual killings – nevertheless the group as such which included men as well as women supported the killers in a number of ways. It is known that many women acted as a kind of cheerleaders who were singing songs while the men raped and killed the Tutsis.26 Although no exact figures are provided on how many women were involved in this way, the report by African Rights clearly describes their participation as extensive. The Gacaca courts tried close to two million suspects, just under ten per cent were women.
These are not the only examples, however. There are for instance also reports from Sudan indicating that women entertained the troops or acted as cheerleaders during the perpetration of crimes. 27 In many armies and especially rebel forces in other countries around the world women and girls are often given administrative or supporting roles as secretaries, cleaning ladies, cooks, porters or slaves.28 In some cases this support was enforced, in other
19 Raul Hilberg, The destruction of the European Jews, (Holmes & Meier, New York, 1985 - originally published in 1961).
20 Christina Herkommer, ‘Women under National Socialism: women’s scope for action and the issue of gender’, in Olaf Jensen & Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds.), Ordinary people as mass murderers – perpetrators in
comparative perspectives, ed. (Palgrave and MacMillan, 2008), pp. 99-119 and Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 11.
Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 84 notes that many women worked for the Gestapo as secretaries and administrators.
21 Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 47.
22 D.P. Brown, The camp women – the female auxiliaries who assisted the SS in running the Nazi concentration
camp system, (A Schiffer Military History Book, 2002); Lower, supra note 16 and Kompisch, supra note 16, p.
12 and p. 88.
23 See Herkommer, supra note 20 and Manfred Mann, ‘Were the perpetrators of genocide ‘ordinary men’ or real Nazis’? Results from fifteen hundred biographies’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2000) 331-366. See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 12 and p. 110 and Lower, supra note 16.
24 Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 137.
25 See Alette Smeulers & Lotte Hoex, ‘Studying the micro-dynamics of the Rwandan genocide, 50 British
Journal of Criminology (2010) 435-454.
26
African Rights, supra note 14,p. 45 and R.V. Adler, C.E. Loyle, J. Globerman, ‘A calamity in the neighborhood: women’s participation in the Rwandan genocide’, 2 Genocide Studies and Prevention (2007) 209-233 at p. 222. African Rights, supra note 14, 72 quotes one of these cheerleaders stated: “I am accused of being there when people were being killed and singing. I admit I did this. I was there when people were being killed. Many people. I joined the animation just as I would join any other choir.’
27 Amnesty International, Sudan: Darfur: Rape as a weapon of war – sexual violence and its consequences, Amnesty International report, of 18 July 2004, AFR 54/076/2004. Another example from Angola: ‘they were forced to dance, sing, respond to sexual demands and keep the men at a high level of excitement 24 hours a day’.
See Yvonne E. Keairnes, The voices of girl child soldiers – summary (Quaker United Nations Office, New York,
2002), at p. 7.
28 In many Africa countries like Sierra Leone women were abducted by the rebels and forced to work for them such as fetching water, doing the laundry, cooking and acting as sex slaves. C. Coulter, Bush wives and Girl
5
cases it was provided voluntarily but whatever the amount of force used it can be concluded that the contribution of these women and girls was crucial for especially rebel forces. One scholar who studied the Revolutionary Armed Front (RUF) during the Sierra Leone conflict concluded: ‘the rebels would never have survived had it not been for the forced productive labor of women’.29 Many girls were forced to support the armies and rebel forces in the abovementioned fashion and become child soldiers (a term which refers to all members of armed forces under the age of 18 not matter whether or not they are actively involved in fighting). The Global Report of the Coalition against the Use of Child Soldiers of 2008 concludes that: ‘…girl soldiers have been present in virtually every non-international conflict, since.’30 Reports suggest that there are 300.000 child soldiers of whom 40 per cent are girls and thus there are allegedly 120.000 girl soldiers worldwide.31 Many of them (willingly or unwillingly) support the perpetration of genocide and other international crimes.
3.2 Women as Profiteers, Thieves, Traitors and Spies
During periods of mass violence many women took advantage of the position of their husbands or the misery of the victims. In Nazi Germany for instance the wives of concentration camp guards employed prisoners to do their households and often treated them very badly, making them work like slaves.32 Jews who were interned in concentration camps had to hand over all their valuables to the Nazis and people running the camp (both male and female) often took advantage thereof and used these goods (clothes, jewelry, money) themselves.33 In Rwanda women searched the bodies of the people killed or searched their hiding places or houses in order to steal valuables.34 Similar incidents are reported in other countries.35
Another typical role played by women during both the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide was as traitor. In Rwanda women in all different kind of sectors betrayed Tutsis.36 This was not only the case for women in governmental organizations but also for teachers at schools who betrayed their pupils and handed them over to the extremists and killer groups; doctors and nurses handed over their patients and nuns handed over the Tutsis who had come to seek refuge at their church or monastery. In 2001 two Rwandan nuns (sister Gertrude and sister Kisito) stood trial in Belgium.37 During the Rwandan genocide they chased all Tutsis who had sought refuge in their monastery out of the monastery and handed them over to the extremists knowing that these groups would immediately kill them. They even bought petrol which was used to set a garage on fire in which 600 Tutsis had fled.38 The Belgium case attracted a lot of media attention especially because the two accused were nuns but in Rwanda many others like them helped and supported the killer groups by betraying the Tutsis who tried to flee for their lives. Women who were not professionally involved showed the killer groups where the Tutsis were living or where they went into hiding.39 In some cases women did not actively betray victims but refused to help the victims and thus contributed to their capture and death.40 In some cases Tutsi women left their
2009), 103. See also J. Annan, C. Blattman, D. Mazurana & K. Carlson, ‘Civil war, reintegration, and gender in Northern Uganda’, 55 Journal of Conflict Resolution (2011) 877-908 at p. 883 and S. McKay & D. Mazurana,
Where are the girls? Girls in fighting forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique: their lives during and after war, (Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development,
Montreal, 2004), p. 17.
29 Coulter, supra note 28, p. 117. 30
Child Soldiers Global Report 2008, (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, London, 2008), at 28 [See a list of government forces who use girl soldiers at p. 29).
31 See Voice of America (2009), 120.000 Girls believed to be child soldiers, available at
http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2005-04-25-voa27/394897.html (last checked 7 June 2013) 32
See also Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 113. 33 Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 181.
34 African Rights, supra note 14, 81; Hogg, supra note 16, 78 and Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 222. 35 Coulter, supra note 28, 112 and Dara Cohen, The role of female combatants in armed groups: women and
wartime rape in Sierra Leone (1991-2002), 65 World Politics (2013) 383-415.
36 See African Rights, supra note 14, p. 2 and 12 but also Hogg, supra 16, 70 and Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 212.
37 The two nuns had to stand trial together with two others a university professor and a factory owner. They were known as the Butare Four and were the very first Rwandese to be convicted by a non-Rwandan court.
38 See African Rights, supra note 14, pp.156-191. The two nuns were convicted on 8 June 2001 were convicted to 12 and 15 years imprisonment.
39 Hogg, supra note 16, p. 78. 40
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children under the protection of Hutu women but some of these women turned the children in to the killer groups.41
During the Nazi Holocaust many Jews all over Europe were betrayed (by men and women).42 In some countries like for instance in the Netherlands people could earn money by betraying Jews. It was only a small fee but some traitors became good at it and thus earned quite some extra money. In other cases Jews who had been captured could save their life by starting to work for the Germans and betray other Jews. Although most traitors were men – women too were involved. One of the most infamous trial cases in the Netherlands involved a Jewish woman, Ans van Dijk. After the Nazis took control over the Netherlands Van Dijk never officially registered as a Jew and could thus live a fairly ordinary life despite the German occupation. She often helped other Jews to escape until the day she was betrayed and arrested by the Dutch police. After her arrest she was given the choice to be sent off to the death camps immediately or save her own life by starting to work for the Dutch police by
searching for and betraying other Jews. Van Dijk took the offer and unfortunately she turned out to be extremely well at her job. Together with a few others amongst whom a number of women she allegedly betrayed over 100 Jews.43 After the war Ans van Dijk was the only woman in the Netherlands who received the death penalty and was publicly executed for her role in the Second World War.
In some countries women were used as spies, because they are often not seen as dangerous but rather as innocent victims and can thus easier manipulate people. 44 They were sent to villages and towns in order to make friends and find themselves lovers amongst the soldiers and get information on the town.45 This information was then used to attack the town.
3.3 Women as Prison and Camp Guards
An even more active role was played by women who were prison or camp guards. In many countries female guards are appointed to serve as guards of the prisons and camps in which women are held. In Nazi Germany over 3500 women served as concentration camp guards and had to guard the women, were responsible for maintaining order and discipline within the camp and conducted selections at the ramp. Round and about six per cent of all concentration camp guards were female.46 Most of them received their training at Ravensbrück. Some of these women became known as extremely cruel and sadistic guards as for instance Irma Grese, camp guard at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and later Bergen Belsen. She always carried around a whip in order to beat up prisoners and seemed to derive sadistic pleasure from the suffering of others. According to one witness at her trial she killed about 30 prisoners a day.47 Grese is however not the only infamous female guard known for her cruelty and sadism. Johanna Borman was known as the woman with the dog as she set off her dog to attack and kill exhausted prisoners and Maria Mandel put together a Jewish orchestra which was to play music during the selections at the ramp and the executions thereafter. Dorothea Binz continuously hit the prisoners. Ruth Neudeck took off the clothes of some inmates, poured cold water over them and made them stay in the cold for hours.48 After the Second World War about 60 of the female camp guards stood trial for the war crimes tribunals between 1945-1949, many of them were described as more brutal than their male counterparts.49 A total of 21 of these women were executed.50
41 L. Sharlach, ‘Gender and genocide in Rwanda: women as agents and objects of genocide’,1 Journal of
Genocide Research (1999) 387-399 at p. 392.
42 Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 74 notes that betrayals by private persons was crucial.
43 Koos Groen, Als slachtoffers daders worden – de zaak van de Joodse verraadster Ans van Dijk (Ambo, Baarn, 1994).
44
See for an example Coulter, supra note 28, p. 9. 45 Coulter, supra note 28,p.104.
46 Brown, supra note 22.
47 Daniel Patrick Brown, The beautiful beast – the life and crimes of SS-Aufseherin Iran Grese (Golden West Publications, Ventura, 1996). See however also the comments in section 4.1 of this paper in relation to the biased portrayal of female perpetrators.
48 Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 186.
49 Ilse Koch although not formally a camp guard but the wife of camp commander Karl Koch also became known for her cruelty. It was alleged that she ordered lampshades and photo albums out of human skin and she ordered Jews with nice tattoos to be killed for this very reason. These allegations could however –despite desperate efforts - not be proven in two court cases and might very well be based on false rumours and lies. Ilse Koch was nevertheless convicted to life imprisonment.
50
7
A more recent example of female prison guards committing atrocities was the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison during the American War on Terror. A number of women figured prominently in the pictures published by CBS 60 minutes in which the Iraqi prisoners were humiliated, harassed and sexually abused. The pictures shocked the American public. President Bush was quick to call the perpetrators rotten apples but it later turned out that they were acting according to the broader guidelines as designed by the Pentagon.51 The American interrogators had asked the prison guards to soften up the prisoners in order to prepare them for the interrogations. In the night shift a group of guards amongst whom a number of women started to systematically abuse the Iraqi prisoners. The fact that they took pictures of the abuse seems to indicate that they were not aware of the fact that they were committing horrendous acts in clear violation of international law.
In former Yugoslavia too there are known cases of female camp guards committing international crimes. Indira Vrbanjac Kameric was indicted for crimes committed while being one of the commanders of a detention camp. Monika Simonovic, the girlfriend of Goran Jelisic who was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment by the ICTY, has beaten and maltreated many prisoners together with Jelisic and was arrested in December 2011. A witness remembers: ‘she wasn’t a woman, she was a monster.’52 Another woman, Azra Basic was ‘accused of killing a prisoner and torturing others by forcing them to drink human blood and gasoline and having them kneel on broken glass.53 Usually men and women are not detained in the same (ward of a) prison and in principle women only act as guards within women’s prisons. It can thus be expected that the extent of involvement of women as prison and camp guards is much smaller than the role of men but nevertheless probably quite extensive.
3.4 Women as Interrogators and Torturers
As already noted above many women abused their role as camp and prison guards and many of them severely mistreated and abused the inmates. In some cases such abuse can be qualified as torture as is the case with the medical experiments conducted in the Nazi concentration camps. The inmates of these camps were used as guinea pigs in medical experiments conducted by the Nazi doctors. Next to many men54 women too were involved in these experiments.55 Some as nurses others as doctors. At the Nazi Medical Trial, which was conducted shortly after the war, one of the 23 defendants was a woman, Herta Oberheuser. She was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
A few women have acted as interrogators and torturers although there are not many known cases. One of the few known accounts of a female interrogator at work is by Erik Saar an interpreter at Guantanamo Bay. He describes the interrogation of a Muslim terror suspect by an American female interrogator at which he was present. Saar describes how the female interrogator progressively tried to provoke the devote Muslim by using her sexuality. It is a chilling and saddening account of pure humiliation in which the woman ends up smearing a red substance on the prisoners face making him believe it is menstrual blood. The pious Muslim prisoner almost became
hysterical and Saar chillingly describes how he shouted at the top of his lungs.56 There are also a few reported cases of female torturers in Spain in the period in which the ETA was still considered a dangerous terrorist organization57 and in South Africa under the Apartheid regime in which female torturers tortured others by pumping water into another woman’s fallopian tubes and applying electric shocks to their victims.58
Incidents
51
See a.o. K.J. Greenberg & J.L. Dratel (eds.), The torture papers – the road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005) and P. Gourevitch, & E. Morris, Standard operating procedure (Penguin Press, New York, 2008).
52 M. Husejnovic, Bosnian war’s wicked women get off lightly, balkaninsight.com:
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnian-war-s-wicked-women-get-off-lightly (last checked 25 may 2013).
53 See Bosnian police arrest female monster, available at:
http://bosniagenocide.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/bosnian-police-arrests-serbian-female-monster-monika-simonovic-ilic/ (last checked 25 May 2013).
54 See the book by R.J. Lifton, Nazi doctors: medical killing and the psychology of genocide (Basic Books, New York, 1988).
55 See Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 112 who quotes Schwarz. 56
E. Saar & V. Novak, Inside the wire – a military intelligence soldier’s eyewitness account of life at
Guantanamo (The Penguin Press, New York, 2005) at p. 222.
57 Eileen McDonald, Shoot the women first (Forth Estate, London, 1991), p. 50.
58 See B. Goldblatt & S. Meintjes, ‘South African women demand the truth’, in M. Turshen & C. Twagiramaria,
8
with female torturers have also been reported from Uruguay and Brazil.59 In February last year international news agencies reported that in Bahrain a princess was accused of torture.60 But as there are very few other documented examples it seems fair to conclude that apparently only very few women so far have acted as interrogators and torturers and this is still generally a men’s job.61 The only clear trend is the progressive use of women as interrogators in the War on Terror.
3.5 Women as Killers and Murderers
Women have also been involved in genocide and other periods of mass violence as killers and murderers. Many of the female camp guards in Nazi Germany participated in the selections and thus had an active role in sending Jews to the gas chambers. Nurses who worked in the concentration and death camps took part in the selections too, deciding who was still fit enough to work and who was not. In some cases they personally gave the inmates lethal injections. Many women were - as nurses or doctors - also involved as killers and murderers in the Euthanasia programme in which about 100.000 people were deliberately killed because they were considered unfit to live.62 Lower notes that some of the worst perpetrators were women who did not have an official function but who accompanied their husbands to execution sites or concentration and death camps and took advantage of their situation and killed Jews, some without any reason: just for the fun of it.63 Female camp guards in Nazi Germany and former Yugoslavia sometimes shot prisoners or beat them to death.64 On 30 April 2012 the first woman was convicted by a Bosnian court for killing six men during an attack in April 1993. Rasema Handanovic had been raped herself during the war before she committed these crimes.65 There are currently 40 other ongoing investigations against women who are suspected of their involvement in Bosnia. In Rwanda women played a huge role in the genocide but it seems that only a few were ‘directly engaged in the killings’.66 This is probably due to the fact that ‘there were few women, in the best known of the killing machines – the army, gendarmerie and trained militia, the Interahamwe.’ But some were nevertheless actively involved. In a report by Human Rights Watch late genocide scholar Alison des Forges quotes an UNAMIR officer saying: “I had seen war before but I had never seen a women carrying a baby on her back kill another woman carrying a baby on her back.”67 It is furthermore known that after a group of Tutsis had been killed women not only searched the bodies but also often killed those who were still alive.68 Nurses and doctors in Rwandan hospitals not only pointed out Tutsis to the killers but also killed Tutsi patients themselves.69 In 2007 Adler et al. figured out that 3000 women representing over three per cent of the prison population were imprisoned for their role in the genocide. Those imprisoned can be considered to have played a larger role and possibly be directly involved in the killings.
59 M.K. Huggins, M. Haritos-Fatouras & P.G. Zimbardo, Violence workers – police torturers and murderers
reconstruct Brazilian atrocities (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002).
60 Reuters (30-01-2013). Bahraini princess on trial for torturing detainees at
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/30/us-bahrain-princess-trial-idUSBRE90T0UU20130130 (last visitited 13 March 2013).
61
See also Huggins et al., supra note 59 who came to a similar conclusion.
62 Kompisch, supra note 16, pp. 125-126. See also B.R. McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany: moral
choices in history, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999).
63 Lower, supra note 16 mentions this at several places in her book and provides examples of women who took a gun and shot Jews from their balcony.
64 Husejnovic, supra note 52 provides an example from former Yugoslavia in which a woman who executed people because her father had been shot.
65 See newspaper clipping:
http://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKBRE83T0KU20120430?irpc=979 (accessed 23 June 2013).
66 See for instance African Rights, supra note 14, p. 1 and Hogg, supra note 16, p. 70 and, p. 77,= at which she quotes a female genocide suspect who stated: ‘The difference is that men killed, women didn’t. I hear that some women called out to be killers, but I didn’t see them do it.’
67 Alison des Forges, Leave none to tell the story – genocide in Rwanda (Human Rights Watch, New York, 1999), p. 261.
68 African Rights, supra note 14, p. 81. 69
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In many other countries women were soldiers in regular governmental armies or irregular rebel forces70 and as such killed others. Sometimes in a legitimate battle in other cases it was plain murder. Waller for instance notes that in Cambodia ‘many Khmer Rouge women committed the same atrocities as men.’71 Kesic concluded that: ‘there were women in all the militias and national armies throughout the former Yugoslavia’ and some without doubt committed mass atrocities.72 Many girl soldiers fought in armies which committed mass atrocities. Although there are few direct reports of women committing international crimes in this way it is very likely that women too were actively involved in these crimes. In Sierra Leone for instance there were small girls units next to the infamous small boys units.73 Female fighters have been said to be active in countries such as Peru, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Vietnam, El Salvador, Columbia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Uganda.74 This is not a recent phenomenon: Waller provides some other more historical examples and states that in World War II more than one million women served in the Soviet army. It is furthermore known that many women fought alongside men in guerilla and revolutionary wars.75
It is also known that many female spies and female terrorists have been involved in terrorist attacks resulting in deaths. On 29 November 1987 for instance a bomb exploded on Korean Airline 858 killing all 115 passengers. Kim Hyon Hui a female North Korean agent had planted the bomb. In the terrorist organizations such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), Front Liberation National (FLN), Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Red Brigades women were involved in many functions including as the ones who planted bombs and killed innocent bystanders. Especially the so-called black widows in Chechnya became infamous.76 They were for instance involved in the Moscow hostage taking in October 2002. Fifty Chechen rebels amongst whom 20 women held 800 visitors of the theatre hostage. In the failed rescue attempt 39 terrorists and 129 hostages died. In the last few years women have also been involved in suicide attacks. Sana Mehaildli a Syrian young woman blew herself up on 9 April 1985 killing two Israelian soldiers is believed to be the first female suicide terrorist. Bloom notes that the use of female suicide bombers is a global trend.77 According to Sjoberg and Gentry 22 out of 27 suicide attacks (and thus 81 per cent) in
Chechnya were perpetrated by women.78 Another group infamous for female suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers – allegedly 30 per cent of their suicide attacks are committed by women. 79 Wafra Idris was the first female suicide bomber in Palestine in January 2002. It is estimated that almost seven per cent of the suicide attacks in Palestine are committed by women and in Iraq less than one per cent.80 Since 2005 Al-Qaeda also uses female suicide bombers.81 Women are however still underrepresented in terrorist organizations and it is alleged that about ten per cent are female although this percentage is as high as 30-40 per cent in organizations such as the revolutionary armed forces in Colombia (FARC) and in Chechnya.82 The use of female suicide bombers might however increase as they draw much more media attention than the attacks by men: ‘the image of women defying tradition to sacrifice their lives for the Palestinian cause has drawn more attention to the despair of the Palestinian people.’83
3.6 Women as Sex-offenders
70 Coulter, supra note 28, p. 18 concludes that with Sierra Leone : ‘women fighters participated in the violence with their male counterparts on a widespread scale’. See also Cohen, supra note 35.
71
J. Waller, Becoming evil – how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killings (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 300 footnote 12.
72 Kesic as quoted by F. Wilmer, The social construction of man, the state and war – identity, conflict and
violence in the former Yugoslavia (Routledge, New York, 2002), p. 215.
73
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 109.
74 See Coulter, supra note 28, 137; African Rights, supra note 14, p. 7 and Annan et al. supra note 28, p. 2. 75 Waller, supra note 71, p. 300 footnote 12.
76 See S. Adler, Ich sollte als Schwarze Witwe sterben, (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005). 77
M. Bloom, Female suicide bombers – a global trend, Daedalus (2007) 1-9.
78 Laura Sjoberg & Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, monsters, whores – women’s violence in global politics (Zed Books, London, 2007), p. 98.
79 Human Security Report 2005- war and peace in the 21 century, (Oxford University Press, New York, 2005) estimate that 30% of suicides by women.
80 Sjoberg & Gentry, supra note 78, p. 112. 81 Ibid, p. 127.
82 B. De Graaf, Gevaarlijke Vrouwen – tien militante vrouwen in het vizier (Boom, Amsterdam, 2012) at 319. 83
10
The probably most unexpected role of female perpetrators is as sex offenders. Yet women have also been involved in war related sexual violence. African Rights reports that during the Rwandan genocide women were involved in sexual violence.84 A witness reports how a woman who had a hairdresser’s shop in Kigali killed a wealthy Tutsi business woman: ‘Maman Aline demanded to kill the woman herself. There were some displaced women from Gisozi who had pointed sticks. They tried to penetrate her vagina with them. They opened her legs and Maman Aline penetrated her vagina with a stick. Then [a woman called] Pauline came along with a big masu and hit her on the head.’85 In the book The men who killed me there is a story of a thirteen year old Tutsi boy who was held prison by a Hutu woman who sexually abused him for a number of weeks.86 But these are not the only cases: other scholars studying mass atrocities in Africa have reported that women were involved in committing sexual violence.
Dara Cohen reports that within Sierra Leone committing a gang rape was considered a means of combat socialization and women as well as men participated in these gang rapes. According to some estimates women were involved in one out of four gang rapes in Sierra Leone.87 Within this conflict the RUF was considered the group which was most responsible for sexual violence and this was also the group which had most women in its ranks.88 Women often picked the victims and held them down during the gang rape. In other cases women used bottles and other objects to rape the victims themselves.89 A quantitative analysis by Lynn Lawry in DR Congo shows that in this conflict too women were actively involved in sexual violence. She concludes that ‘17 per cent of survivors of sexual based gender violence perpetrated by the Mai Mai name females as perpetrators’.90 More in general 40 per cent of the female survivors and ten per cent of the male survivors of sexual violence report the perpetrator to be female.91
The pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib shows that in the War on Terror women were purposefully used to sexually abuse and humiliate the devout Muslims: they were held naked in sexually humiliating positions in the presence of women. The policy was deliberate, structural and widespread. An American scholar and attorney concluded: ‘During the last year and a half, I learned that my clients - devout Muslim men - have been subject to sexual harassment and abuse both in and out of interrogation. They have been forced to strip naked in front of female guards; some have had their private parts touched and squeezed; some have been offered sex in exchange for cooperation; some have been threatened with rape.’92
In former Yugoslavia sexual violence was also widespread. So far little is known about the role of women but in some cases they were indeed involved. One female camp commander apparently took female prisoners to the front lines for the soldiers to rape them.93 We can thus conclude that most sexual violence is probably still committed by men but that the involvement of women in sexual violence is probably much larger than initially expected.
3.7 Women as Political Leaders and Instigators
Women can also come to play a crucial role during a period of mass atrocities as political leaders. So far the only two women who have been convicted by international criminal courts and tribunals were political leaders. Biljana Plavsic was vice-president of the Republika Srpska and thus a leading Serbian political figure. She was
84 African Rights, supra note 14, p. 83 and see also Hogg, supra note 16. 85 African Rights, supra note 14, p. 40.
86
A.M. de Brouwer & S.K. Hon Chu, The men who killed me (Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, 2009) 87 See Cohen, supra note 35 and M. Humphreys & J. M. Weinstein, What the fighters say: a survey of
ex-combatants in Sierra Leone, (June-August 2003), Centre on Globalization and sustainable development,
Columbia University, available 2004 at: http://www.columbia.edu/~mh2245/Report1_BW.pdf (last checked 19 June 2013).
88 Cohen, supra note 35.
89 See also examples reported by Human Rights Watch, We’ll kill you if you cry, (Human Rights Watch, New York, 2002) and Cohen, supra note 35.
90
L. Lawry, K. Johnson, J. Asher, ‘Evidence-based documentation of gender-based violence’, in: A.L.M. Brouwer, C. de, Ku, R. Römkens, R., & L. van den Herik, (eds.), Sexual violence as an international crime:
Interdisciplinary approaches (Intersentia, Cambridge, 2013) at p. 300.
91 Ibid, pp. 300-301. 92
Kristine A. Huskey, ‘The sex interrogators of Gunatanamo’, in Tara McKelvey (ed.), One of the guys – women
as aggressors and torturers, (Seal Press, Emeryville, 2007), at p. 176.
11
indicted for persecution and pleaded guilty. The Trial Chamber of the ICTY concluded that she ‘embraced and supported the objective […] and contributed to achieving it. She did not participate with Milosevic, Karadzic, Krajisnik and others in its conception and planning and had a lesser role in its execution than Karadzic, Krajisnik and others.’94 Her role was amongst others to encourage participation and publicly justifying the use of force. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was also a political leader. She was a Rwandan minister and one of the members of the inner circle of power holders who prepared the genocide and charged and convicted with genocide and sentenced to life by the ICTR.95 Both women show that women too can instigate others to commit mass atrocities . Their cases will be discussed in more detail in section 5.
With a few notable exceptions very few women play an important role in politics in a period of mass violence. In Rwanda for instance women were underrepresented: there were 3 female government ministers and 12 out of 70 members of parliament were female, there were no female bourgmestres and only one per cent of the conseillers were women.96 Yet next to Nyiramasuhuko some other women played a leading role in the Rwandan genocide. Agathe Kanziga, the widow of president Habyarimana played an important role too. After her husband died she fled abroad and provided funding to Radio Milles Collines as well as the extremist newspaper Kangura which both infamous for instigating people to commit genocide.97 Agnes Ntamabyaliro was Minister of Justice and was given a life sentence in Rwanda for her role in the genocide.98 Other women participated in indoctrination meetings and as such participated in the preparation of genocide99 or took the lead during the genocide. African Rights concluded that ‘some of the most cruel local government officials who organized the killings; especially in Kigali, were women.’100 On a list published by the Rwandan government 2202 suspects including 47 women were named because of their prominent and leading roles in the genocide.101
Ieng Thirith is a further prominent example. She was indicted by the Extra-ordinary Chambers of the Cambodian Courts (ECCC) for her role in the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. She was Minister of Social Affairs and the wife of one of the other accused, Ieng Sary who died in March 2013 before he could be tried. Thirith played an important role in the genocide. The Chamber however ordered a stay of the prosecution because she was unfit to stand trial. Some women can gain power by the mere fact that their husbands are head of state. Some of these women do not interfere with their husband’s job but some do and are known to have played an important role by influencing their powerful husbands and taking up the role of ‘Madame President’. A prominent example thereof is Mira Markovic, the wife of late Slobodan Milosevic, who is said to have been the driving force behind her husband. She spurred him on to gain more and more power – no matter at what costs. Another example is Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao, who played an active role during the cultural revolution and after Mao’s death. But there were others such as Eva Perron, Elena Ceausescu and Simone Gbagbo who is now indicted by the International Criminal Court.
3.8 A Variety of Roles
From the above enumeration it can be concluded that more men than women are involved in international crimes but also that many more women than so far assumed have been involved in mass atrocities. The presented anecdotal evidence has furthermore proven that there seems to be no role women haven’t played in the past. Most women are indirectly involved by supporting the regime and the criminal policies or behavior of their husbands. Many women have an administrative or supporting role but still quite a few are physically involved as traitors, thieves, prison and camp guards or combatants. Women can even be involved in sexual violence – sometimes in a supporting capacity (holding the victim) but in some cases also as the main physical perpetrator. The role of women as hands-on perpetrators is limited compared to men but might very well be much larger than we have assumed so far.102 The gathered evidence shows that women too can commit horrendous crimes and physically or sexually abuse, maltreat or kill other people. Women in other words can be as evil as men.
94 ICTY 3 February 2003, Prosecutor versus Plavisc, IT-00-39&40/1-S.
95 ICTR 24 June 2011, Prosecutor versus Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and others, Case No. ICTR -98-42-T. 96
Hogg, supra note 16, p. 74. 97 Ibid, p. 90.
98 Ibid, p. 75. Another important Rwandese politician was Agathe Uwillingiyimana who had been prime minister of Rwanda and one of the first to be killed in the genocide.
99
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 15. 100 Ibid, p. 3.
101 Hogg, supra note 16, p. 90.
12
4. The Gender Effect
The above overview shows that in history women have been found to play almost any possible role in relation to mass atrocities. Yet it is also true that many more men than women are involved in international crimes – especially in the physical perpetration thereof.103 An interesting question is obviously how we can explain this. Within especially feminist discourses women have been assumed to be inherently more peaceful than man but are they really? What about the women described in the sections above who have been involved in mass atrocities? Are they all special and extra-ordinary (read: abnormal) women? Or are they ordinary women not very different from the ordinary men capable of mass atrocities and can the fact that so many more men than women are involved be explained by social factors alone? In the following subsections we will try to find answers to these questions. In doing so we will focus on the role of gender both in the portrayal of female perpetrators as in organizations such as the military and amongst political leaders. This is particularly relevant as most convicted perpetrators are either political leaders or members of militarized units.
4.1 Portrayal of Female Perpetrators: a Clear Gender Bias
Within literature and the media there is a remarkable difference between the portrayal of female perpetrators compared to male perpetrators. Female perpetrators are often described as mentally insane sadists who are more cruel and sadistic than their male counterparts. It however remains to be seen as to whether they really are more cruel or merely portrayed that way because people have trouble believing that women are capable of such extreme atrocities. In the portrayal of female perpetrators the overriding message seems to be that women who are involved must be either mentally disturbed, ‘unnatural and abnormal’ or must have been forced to commit such atrocities.104 Sjoberg and Gentry studied the portrayal of female perpetrators and conclude that they are either portrayed as mothers, monsters or whores: ‘The mother narrative describes women’s violence as a need to belong, a need to nurture, and a way of taking care of and being loyal to men: motherhood gone awry. The monster narrative eliminates rational behavior, ideological motivation, and culpability from women engaged in political violence. Instead, they describe violent women as insane, in denial of their feminity, no longer women or human. The whore narrative blames violence on the evils of female sexuality at its most intense or its most vulnerable.’105 These narratives are all very stereotyped and: ‘exclude the possibility that women can choose to be violent because violent women interrupt gender stereotypes. “Real” women are peaceful, conservative, virtuous and restrained; violent women ignore those boundaries of womanhood’.106
Within the media coverage of cases of international crimes there are many illustrations of the ‘mother, monster, whore’ thesis forwarded by Sjoberg and Gentry. After the Second World War for instance the press covered the trials of female Nazis in a sensationalistic manner and very different from the coverage of trials in which the accused were male. The media described the female perpetrators as ‘beasts, sadists and seductresses’.107
In one of the first of these Nazi trials Irma Grese a former camp guard at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen stood trial.108 Initially the press and public talked more about her appearance than about her crimes but when the atrocious crimes she committed became known she quickly received the nickname of the beautiful beast. She was however not the only one given a nickname: many other women were given nicknames such as the ‘witch of
103 A similar gender gap has been identified by criminologists studying ordinary and conventional crime in relation to violent and serious crimes. See J. Miller & Christopher Mullins, ‘Feminist theories of girls’
delinquency’ at 32 and Robert Agnew, ‘The contribution of “mainstream” theories to the explanation of female delinquency’, both published in M. Zahn (ed.), The delinquent girl (Temple University Press 2009) at p. 7. 104 See e.g. Coulter, supra note 2, p. 63 and Lower, supra note 16, p. 287. See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 236 who notes that female perpetrators in Nazi Germany were portrayed as either being young and naïve, being seduced by men or beasts.
105 Sjoberg & Gentry, supra note 78, p. 13. See also the paper by Heschel entitled ‘Feminist Theory and the perpetrators’ as quoted by Waller, supra note 71, p. 301, footnote 12 and Lower, supra note 16, p. 290. 106
Sjoberg & Gentry, supra note 78, pp. 50-51. Similar trends can be seen within criminological studies in discussions and research on female delinquency. See Miller & Mullins, supra note 103, p. 32.
107 Lower, supra note 16, p. 70
13
Buchenwald’ and ‘bloody Brigitte’ and most of these women were depicted as sexually perverted women.109 By demonizing female perpetrators a distance between these “abnormal and unnatural” women and ordinary peaceful women was created. Just after the atrocities committed at Auschwitz and the many other camps people did not want to believe that the perpetrators (whether male or female) where ordinary people and preferred to see them as mentally disturbed, inherently violent and criminal human beings. Scholars such as Hilberg, Arendt and Browning have however convincingly showed that most perpetrators were rather ordinary and that they can come to commit evil crimes for very banal reasons.110 Thanks to their scholarship it is now generally accepted that most perpetrators are indeed just very ordinary people. This insight is however limited to men: it seems that the assumption that female perpetrators cannot be ordinary women is still prevalent today. The underlying thought and assumptions clearly is that: ‘real women do not commit such crimes’.111 Women who fight transgress the female stereotypes more than men do and are therefore more often considered as ‘deviant and unnatural’.112 In most cultures men are considered to be more aggressive and women are supposed to be more caring – seeing a woman commit atrocities is thus often more shocking than seeing a man commit similar atrocities. Cunningham noted: ‘Women’s involvement in political violence continually shock us, no matter the context, challenging cross-cultural gendered normative assumptions about human behavior […]’.113 It might thus be very well possible that women are portrayed as more evil without actually being more evil. 114
Next to being portrayed as evil monsters, female perpetrators are also often portrayed as lacking agency.115 The assumption yet again being that ordinary women would not commit such atrocities so - if they are not insane - they must have been forced. Women themselves have in some cases supported these stereotyped gender images. Especially while defending themselves in front of a court many women tried to exploit these sentiments by declaring that they could not possibly have committed atrocious crimes out of their own accord.116 In some cases this worked and some judges trying female perpetrators were influenced by these same gender stereotypes.117 Outside of the courtroom most female soldiers do however not like to be considered as being different compared to their male counterparts, nor as lacking of agency. The ‘vast majority’ of female soldiers interviewed by Eriksson Baaz and Stern ‘…described themselves as having equal propensity for and agency in the violence committed in comparison with their male colleagues.118
These examples and the stereotyped portrayal of female perpetrators as either wicked and insane or as being forced by men clearly show us that within society there are clear gender norms which dictate what can be perceived as acceptable and unacceptable behavior for men and women respectively. Atrocities violate legal and moral norms no matter whether they are committed by men or women but women who are involved in mass
109 See also Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 114. The same is true for the portrayal of ordinary female delinquents. They too are often portrayed as sexual deviant and a sexualized image of them is presented. See Miller & Mullins, supra note 103, p. 47.
110 H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – a report on the banality of evil (Penguin Books, New York, 1964); R. Hilberg Perpetrators, victims, bystanders – the Jewish catastrophe (Harper Perennial, New York, 1992); Ch.R., Browning, Ordinary men - Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (Aaron Asher Books, New York, 1992).
111 Hogg, supra note 16, p. 100. See also Sjoberg & Gentry, supra note 78, p. 2.
112 Coulter, supra note 28, p. 14. See also Gilani, ‘Transforming the perpetrator into victim: the effects of gendering violence on the legal and practical responses to women’s political violence’, Australian Journal of
Gender and Law (2010) 1-40 at p. 9 who notes: ‘these narratives imply that violence is an inevitable
consequence of a woman failing to conform to her prescribed gender norms.’
113 K.J. Cunningham, ‘Female participation in the Iraqi insurgency: insights into nationalist and religious warfare’, in Chandler et al., supra note 9, p. 205.
114 See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 181.
115 See for instance in relation to Nazi crimes Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 234. In some cases this lead to remarkable acquittals as in the Euthanasia trial in 1965 in which 14 nurses of the Meseritz-Obrawalde centre were acquitted. Anne-Marie de Brouwer & Etienne Ruvebana, ‘The legacy of the Gacaca courts in Rwanda’, 13
International Criminal Law Review (2013) 937-976 and Gilani supra note 112, at p. 6 states: ‘when a woman
commits an act of violence she is rarely regarded as an agent of violence, and more often considered a victim herself.’
116
Kompisch, supra note 16, p.196 and p. 235; Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 107 and Hogg, supra note 16, p. 82.
117 Lower, supra note 16, p. 257 especially the influence of their husbands was in many cases considered detrimental.
118
14
atrocities violate gender norms in addition to that and that often becomes the central focus of attention when reporting these atrocities. This finding raises the question as to what gender is and how it affects the behavior of men and women and to what extent it plays a role in the capacity of men and women to commit atrocities. These issues will be discussed in the next section in which we draw particular attention to the effect of gender roles and norms with two institutions which are particular relevant to this study as most perpetrators are members of these two institutions: the political leadership of a country and the military.
4.2 The Effect and Role of Gender Norms on Women in the Political Arena and in Militarized Units
Gender roles and gender norms play an important role in each and every society. They reflect ‘socially assigned, expected roles on the basis of perceived membership in implicitly natural sex groups’119 and tend to push women and men into these roles. Traditionally speaking men are expected to be the protectors of their families who provide money, food and shelter for their families while women are meant to look after the children and do work at home. Men may consequently be aggressive and violent while women are required to be sensitive and compassionate. Women are furthermore in many places still far from equal to men, have less education, and fewer means to get certain jobs and positions. Men are often considered natural leaders while women are supposed to follow their leadership. This explains why it is generally harder for women to make themselves a career than for men and explains why women are underrepresented within the political leadership of a country. Although some women defy these gender roles and became part of this leadership as we shall see in section 5, they often somehow do not seem to fully fit into this men’s world: they do not belong to ‘the old boys club’ and are often merely tolerated rather than fully respected. Although there are some prominent exceptions very few women have arisen to a position of real power in patriarchal and oppressive societies which often strongly embrace these gender norms.
Gender roles and norms have equally stirred women away from the military. Throughout history the vast majority of all combatants are male. Women who served in the army were often nurses or aides who were not involved in actual combat. There were for instance 500.000 women in the Wehrmacht (compared to 18 million men) and 4.000 in the SS (compared to 900.000 men).120 There were thus less than three per cent women in the Wehrmacht and less than one per cent women in the SS. In Rwanda less than ten per cent of the Interahamwe members were women.121 Women thus represented only a small minority of the members within these
organizations. It is only since the last 40 years that this is gradually changing although many women are still not allowed to actively engage in combat.122 In some conflicts women do play a more prominent role: in both Sierra Leone and Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA) 30 per cent of the members are female. But even though these numbers are remarkable women are still clearly a minority group. As most hands-on perpetrators are members of militarized units such as the army, the police force or specialized units the underrepresentation of women can explain why so many more men than women are involved in mass atrocities. This however is not the only reason. Equally important is the very patriarchal nature of the military in which gender roles and norms are clearly enshrined.
Within the military being a good soldier is often linked to masculinity and many armies promote the ideal male identity as being a heroic warrior.123 In these stereotyped images males are pictured as ‘protectors of the civil population with a duty to protect women and children’124 and as having courage and lacking fear while women are portrayed as weak and full of fear.125 For many men the army is the place to prove one’s manhood and being called a woman is an insult.126 Making it through military training is often seen as a test of manhood and those
119 Laura Sjoberg, ‘Reconstructing women in post-conflict Rwanda’, in Chandler et al., supra note 9, p. 181. See also Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 6 who concluded that: ‘masculinities and femininities are made up of behaviour expectations, stereotypes, and rules which apply to persons because they are understood to be a member of particular sex categories.
120 Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 216 and p. 234. 121
Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 223.
122 Human Security Report (HSR) of 2005, supra note 79, estimated that nowadays 5-15% of government armed service personnel are female at p. 111.
123 McKay and Mazurana, supra note 28, p. 14. 124
Eriksson Baaz & Stern, supra note 2, p. 712
125 M. Eriksson Baaz & M. Stern, ‘Whores, men, and other misfits: undoing ‚feminization in the armed forces in the DRC’, African Affairs (2011) at p. 573.
126 M. Eriksson Baaz & M. Stern, Making sense of violence: voices of soldiers in the Congo (DRC), 46 Journal
